Vulgar Latin (in
Renaissance Latin,
vulgare Latinum or
Latinum vulgare; in Latin the words can be in any order as their declensions and conjugations make the sense) is language that was spoken rather than written. It is sometimes called
colloquial Latin. Historians and bibliographers believe that the language spoken by the illiterate was significantly simpler than formal Latin.
[1]Less simply, Vulgar Latin is a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten Latin language spoken by the mainly uneducated and therefore illiterate populations governed by the Roman republic and the Roman empire. The educated population mainly responsible for classical Latin might also have spoken it in familiar circles (ie. friends and family) , depending on their cultural background. The term was first used in that sense by the pioneers of Romance-language philology François Juste Marie Raynouard (1804-1855) and Friedrich Christian Diez (1794-1876).
In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadours of Provence, which had already been studied by Dante Alighieri and published in De vulgari eloquentia, Raynouard noticed that the Romance languages derived in part from vocabulary and syntactical features that were Latin but were not preferred in classical Latin. He hypothesized an intermediate phase and identified it with the Romana lingua, a term that in countries speaking Romance languages meant "nothing more or less than the vulgar speech as opposed to literary or grammatical Latin."[2]
Diez, the principal founder of Romance-language philology, being impressed by the comparative methods of Jakob Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik, which came out in 1819 and was the first to use such methods in philology, decided to apply them to the Romance languages and discovered Reynouard's work, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, published in 1821. Describing himself as a pupil of Reynouard, he went on to expand the concept to all Romance languages, not just the speech of the troubadours, on a systematic basis, thereby becoming the author of a new field.[3]
